My sweet ride

For those who are curious, I thought I’d post some pictures of my sweet ride (the inspiration of the Lambretta manicure in the previous post). I’ve been meaning to post pictures of it for a while, but time gets away from me and I’ve never managed to get good photos, and here we are, mid-August. So rather than the progress posts and glamour shots, etc, I’d planned to do all along, well, this is what you get :)
The scooter is a 1963 Lambretta Li150 Series 3 and has been in the works for years. The story goes that my dad bought me this when I was a baby. I’m not sure what happened but when I hit driving age it remained in the back of an old shed and I never gave it a second thought. Sometime in my mid-twenties, dad tore it down and started painstakingly polishing bits of it for me (you should see my engine!) I had all the body parts painted and… it ended up stored in an old barn again for a year or two. We eventually bring the whole mishmash of bits home (about 8 boxes worth of nuts, bolts and unidentifiable thingamagigs) along with the frame and panels, and it sits for a couple more months while we try to make sense of it. Then, over a conversation about an Emily Strange skateboard I was selling at a garage sale, we meet C, who just happens to be an expert on all things scooter. C needs help moving his garage, we need help turning all that crap into a scooter. An alliance is born and another paint job, half a dozen orders from the UK/US/Ebay, and many many Wednesday nights later, all the parts have been identified, cleaned up/replaced and assembled. Everything on it is either original, replaced with original Italian parts or sourced from the current Lambretta parts manufacturer. I’m damn proud of this, and of everything my man accomplished and learned while building this. The sweet yellow leather bag we found in an antique shop south of the city – its a Ski-doo toolbox from the 1950s/60s, and is the perfect size for a picnic.
Now we’re working on an identical scooter (two months this one’s junior); before long we’ll have a his and hers set ;)